No quarry but lots of questions

Waterloo Region Record

It is easy to cheer the death of the much-feared Dufferin County mega-quarry which would have devoured farmland and threatened the waters of the Grand River. It is harder to answer the urgent questions the end of this project raises for Ontario’s unrelenting commitment to rapid urban growth.

To be sure, this newspaper shares the collective relief that 2,000 acres of prime farmland, a little more than an hour’s drive north of Waterloo Region, will not be lost. This land grows potatoes that feed the cities of southwestern Ontario. Just as important, this is an environmentally sensitive area situated near the headwaters of the Grand, Saugeen, Beaver and Nottawasaga rivers, a vital source of drinking water for one million people.

The quarry’s proponent, Highland Companies, planned to dig more than 200 feet deep in some areas, far below the water table. This would have required huge amounts of water to be pumped out of the ground — with unknown consequences for the surrounding river systems. Since most people in Waterloo Region rely on the Grand for their water supply, this quarry, which would have been Canada’s largest, was a real worry, even if it seemed far away.

Given all this, the Ontario government was wise to order an environmental assessment. That had never been done for a quarry in Ontario and, on one level, it is regrettable that this comprehensive and unbiased investigation will not proceed because it would have addressed concerns the public had every right to raise. In the end, Highland Companies killed the project this week, saying public and government opposition had made it impossible to proceed.

But as Ontario buries this mega-quarry proposal, it is left with major and unresolved issues. We need farmland to feed us. We need the rock and sand under at least some of that farmland to build our cities.

The people of this province are among the world’s most ravenous consumers of crushed rock, gravel and stone, the stuff that would have been dug from the Dufferin mega-quarry. In an average year, the province uses 164 million tonnes of aggregate, or the equivalent of one truckload for every man, woman and child.

One reason for this is that the population of the Greater Toronto Area increases by a million people or more every decade. Waterloo Region is growing too. All these people, newcomers, incomers, newborns, need places to live and work as well as roads to travel on and carry the things they need.

That takes aggregate. We know it won’t come out of a Dufferin mega-quarry. But it will come from somewhere else. And now, based on simple supply and demand, it will cost more, making new highways and homes more expensive. Maybe some of that aggregate will be extracted from gravel pits in Waterloo Region, in Woolwich Township, for instance, where residents have been trying to block such operations but are probably not as well connected and affluent as some of the Torontonians who own land in Dufferin County and opposed the mega-quarry there.

Ontario needs to grow in a sustainable way. But when the jubilation dies down over the collapse of the mega-quarry project, we are left observing a gaping disconnect between urban life in this province and what it takes to sustain that lifestyle. In this case we have saved 2,000 acres of farmland. But keep the champagne corked. Our desire for growth was largely responsible for taking more than two million acres of farmland out of production in the 30 years that ended in 2006.

Today, some of us have stopped a big hole from being dug in the ground. But Ontario has not solved the greater problems of growth as much as kicked them down the road.